Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible

Learning with the Lights Off

Educational Film in the United States

Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible

Description

A vastly influential form of filmmaking seen by millions of people, educational films provide a catalog of twentieth century preoccupations and values. As a medium of instruction and guidance, they held a powerful cultural position, producing knowledge both inside and outside the classroom. This is the first collection of essays to address this vital phenomenon. The book provides an ambitious overview of educational film practices, while each essay analyzes a crucial aspect of educational film history, ranging from case studies of films and filmmakers to broader generic and historical assessments. Offering links to many of the films, Learning With the Lights Off provides readers the context and access needed to develop a sophisticated understanding of, and a new
appreciation for, a much overlooked film legacy.

Learning with the Lights Off

Educational Film in the United States

Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible

Table of Contents

Foreword by Thomas G. SmithAcknowledgmentsAbout the Companion WebsiteIntroduction1. A History of Learning with the Lights Off, Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible2. The Cinema of the Future: Visions of the Medium as Modern Educator, 1895-1910, Oliver Gaycken3. Communicating Disease: Tuberculosis, Narrative, and Social Order in Thomas Edison's Red Cross Seal Films, Miriam Posner4. Visualizing Industrial Citizenship, Lee Grieveson5. Film Education in the Natural History Museum: Cinema Lights Up the Gallery in the 1920s, Alison Griffiths6. Glimpses of Animal Life: Nature Films and the Emergence of Classroom Cinema, Jennifer Peterson7. Medical Education through Film: Animating Anatomy at the American College
of Surgeons and Eastman Kodak, Kirsten Ostherr8. Dr. ERPI Finds His Voice: Electrical Research Products, Inc. and the Educational Film Market, 1927-1937, Heide Solbrig9. Educational Film Projects of the 1930s: Secrets of Success and the Human Relations Film Series, Craig Kridel10. "An Indirect Influence upon Industry": Rockefeller Philanthropies and the Development of Educational Film in the United States, 1935-1953, Victoria Cain11. Cornering The Wheat Farmer (1938), Gregory A. Waller12. The Failure of the NYU Educational Film Institute, Dan Streible13. Spreading the Word: Race, Religion, and the Rhetoric of Contagion in Edgar G. Ulmer's TB Films, Devin Orgeron14. Exploitation as Education, Eric Schaefer15. Smoothing the Contours of
Didacticism: Jam Handy and His Organization, Rick Prelinger16. Museum at Large: Aesthetic Education through Film, Katerina Loukopoulou17. Celluloid Classrooms and Everyday Projectionsists: Post-World War II Consolidation of Community Film Activism, Charles R. Acland18. Screen Culture and Group Discussion in Postwar Race Relations, Anna McCarthy19. "A Decent and Orderly Society": Race Relations in Riot-Era Educational Films, 1966-1970, Marsha Orgeron20. Everything Old Is New Again; or, Why I Collect Educational Films, Skip Elsheimer with Kimberly Pifer21. Continuing Ed: Educational Film Collections in Libraries and Archives, Elena Rossi-Snook22. A Select Guide to Educational Film Collections, Elena Rossi-SnookContributorsIndex

Learning with the Lights Off

Educational Film in the United States

Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible

Author Information

Devin Orgeron is Associate Professor at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association for Moving Image Archivists. He is the author of Road Movies.

Marsha Orgeron is Associate Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University and co-editor of The Moving Image, the journal of Association for Moving Image Archivists. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age.

Dan Streible teaches cinema studies at New York University, where he is also associate director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. He directs the Orphan Film Project and its biennial symposium. He is the author of Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema.

Contributors:

Charles R. Acland is a professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Communication Studies. His books include Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture and the edited collection Residual Media. Duke University Press is publishing both the forthcoming anthology Useful Cinema, coedited with Haidee Wasson, and his next monograph, Swift Viewing in a Cluttered Age. Acland is editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.

Victoria Cain is assistant professor and faculty fellow of museum studies at New York University. She is the co-author of Life on Display: Exhibition, Education and Museums, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She has contributed articles and essays to the Journal of Visual Culture, Science in Context,American Quarterly, and museum+society. She is completing a book on the history of visual education in the United States.

Skip Elsheimer founded and maintains the A/V Geeks Educational Film Archive of more than 23,000 educational and industrial 16mm films. He curates film programs at such venues at the Museum of the Moving Image, Coolidge Corner Theatre (Brookline, Massachusetts), Anthology Film Archives, Aurora Picture Show (Houston), and Chicago Filmmakers.

Oliver Gaycken is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Temple University. He is completing a book entitled Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science. He is editing a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture with Joshua Malitsky on "Science and Documentary," and his articles
appear in Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Science in Context, and Early Popular Visual Culture.

Lee Grieveson is Reader in Film Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London. He is the author of Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early Twentieth Century America (University of California Press, 2004). Most recently, he edited two books with Colin MacCabe, Film and Empire and Film and the End of Empire, and coedited Inventing Film Studies with Haidee Wasson.

Alison Griffiths is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York and a member of the doctoral program in theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Wondrous Difference:Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture and Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. Her most recent book project, Screens Behind Bars: Cinema, Prisons, and the Making of Modern America examines the earliest uses of cinema in the penitentiary.

Craig Kridel is the E. S. Gambrell Professor of Educational Studies and Curator of the Museum of Education, University of South Carolina, and 2011 Scholar in Residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center. He has most recently edited The SAGE Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies and Classic Edition Sources: Education and published with R. V. Bullough Jr. Stories of the Eight Year Study: Rethinking Schooling in America.

Katerina Loukopoulou is Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow
at the History of Art Department of University College London, where she is working towards publication of her research on the relationship between Henry Moore's sculpture and film. She has published articles in Film History and Film Philosophy.

Anna McCarthy is associate professor of cinema studies at NYU and coeditor of the journal Social Text. She is the author of The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America and Ambient Television, as well as coeditor, with Nick Couldry, of the anthology MediaSpace. Her publications include articles in the Journal of Visual Culture, October, GLQ, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and montage a/v.

Devin Orgeron is associate professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. He is the author
of Road Movies and his articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, The Velvet Light Trap, Film Quarterly, and The Moving Image. Devin is coeditor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. He is currently writing a book about contemporary American directors and their work in advertising and music videos.

Marsha Orgeron is associate professor of film studies at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age and a dozen articles in books and journals such as Film Quarterly, The Moving Image, Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television. She is at work on a book about director Sam Fuller's war films, beginning with the 16mm
amateur footage he shot of Falkenau concentration camp at the close of WWII, and is coeditor of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.

Kirsten Ostherr is assistant professor of English at Rice University, where she is engages in teaching and research on film and media studies, specializing in historical health films and medical imaging technologies. She is the author of Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke University Press, 2005), as well as articles on public health, documentary, science fiction, and avant-garde films. She is currently working on a book project called Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies.

Jennifer Petersonis an assistant professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura, as well asthe book anthologies American Cinema's Transitional Era and Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Her book, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Kimberly Pifer is an editor at the 3-C Institute for Social Development in Cary, North Carolina. She received a BA in English from Frostburg State University and a master's degree in professional writing with an emphasis in rhetoric from Old Dominion University.

Miriam Posner is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University, where she is helping to develop a new digital
scholarship program. She received her PhD in Film Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her dissertation, "Depth Perception: Narrative and the Body in American Medical Filmmaking,"examined the ways that physicians have used film to make sense of the human body.

Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of educational, industrial and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. He is the author of The Field Guide to Sponsored Films.

Elena Rossi-Snook is the moving image archivist for the Reserve Film and Video Collection of the New York Public Library and assistant professor of film history at Pratt Institute. Her previous publications include the article "Persistence of Vision:
Public Library 16mm Film Collections in America" in The Moving Image.

Eric Schaefer teaches film and media studies at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, and many articles about low-budget films.

Heide Solbrig is an assistant professor of media and culture in the English and Media Studies Department at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts. She produced the documentary Man and the Middle Class: The Work and Vision of Henry Strauss, about the eminent postwar industrial filmmaker and is writing a book titled Film and Function: A History of Industrial Motivation Film. With Elizabeth Heffelfinger, she edited a special issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television on the
subject of orphan films.

Dan Streible is associate professor of cinema studies at New York University and the author of Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. He directs the Orphan Film Project and its biennial symposium.

Gregory A. Waller teaches in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. His publications include Main Street Amusements: Film and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1895-1930, the sourcebook Moviegoing in America, and various articles concerning the history of 16mm distribution, nontheatrical cinema, and itinerant film exhibition during the 1930s and '40s.

Learning with the Lights Off

Educational Film in the United States

Edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible

Reviews and Awards

"Learning with the Lights Off is a welcome contribution to the literature on educational filmmaking in the United States..." --Journal of Film and Video

"Learning with the Lights Off takes on a broad but remarkably understudied area of film history with zest and depth. In exploring film's educational mission-both real and imagined-each essay in this extraordinary collection gives new insight and meaning to the 'discourse of sobriety' which scholars of nonfiction such as Bill Nichols have seen as its keystone feature. This is a rich and textured investigation that will expand scholarly focus from 'the documentary' to the 'nonfiction film,' which includes such categories as the industrial, instructional, and informational program."--Charles Musser, Yale University